


the blue house

by dadvans



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Angst, F/M, M/M, Miscarriage, Mpreg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-22
Updated: 2018-03-22
Packaged: 2019-04-06 07:59:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14052477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dadvans/pseuds/dadvans
Summary: People make babies happen all the time.Geno and Anna make a baby because they’re in love and they want to start a family.Geno and Sid make a baby because they fuck up.





	the blue house

**Author's Note:**

> thank fucking god for [Snickfic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/pseuds/Snickfic), who held my hand and gave me all the tough love i needed to write this story, and bless the people running the [Angst Fest](https://sidgenoangstfest.tumblr.com/). i don't think i would have challenged myself to start this without such a great incentive. love you, babies.

 

 

People have kids for all sorts of reasons, all sorts of ways.  When an alpha and an omega love each other very much. When an alpha male and an alpha female want to show off.  When a beta male and a beta female forgo a condom because they don’t think it’s as big of a risk, even though that’s an urban legend and they’re being fuck fugue idiots.  When two omegas go to a fertility clinic and buy some prime alpha jizz from a catalogue or meet with an alpha donor or an adoption agency that doesn’t mind that it’s two omegas.  People make babies happen all the time.

Geno and Anna make a baby because they’re in love and they want to start a family.

Geno and Sid make a baby because they fuck up.

 

* * *

 

Geno’s been Sid’s heat partner since Colby got traded.  He’s amazing at it. He always brings over three flats of Sid’s favorite bottled water brand and fruit-filled pastries with a sweet, sticky glaze that gets all over Geno’s fingers when he’s hand-feeding Sid, and he lets Sid lick his fingers clean.  He smells like sourdough bread and winter fruit and mulling spices and he has a fat fucking knot that always feels like it’s going to split Sid up the spine when he first gets it in. He lets Sid ride him and isn’t weird about it, just looks up at him reverently with his huge alpha hands digging into the meat of Sid’s ass, pulling him down and fucking up into him until the hair on his thighs is a matted mess with Sid’s slick.  He helps Sid into the bath and gets the tub temperature just right and massages shampoo into Sid’s hair and is gentle cleaning Sid’s over-sensitive dick and hole, and then he puts two towels down on the floor before he fucks Sid into it again. He uses the condoms that Sid likes the best. He lets Sid sleep in his PJs on the comedown, dirty ones that smell like his own sweat and deodorant. The first time he brought Sid a stone from his house, because they’re _penguins_ , and Sid loved it so much that he did it again and again, and now it’s a routine, and Sid loves routines.

 

* * *

 

“Dude, you reek,” Phil tells him at training camp.  He’s probably just not used to Sid’s ancient equipment with decades of stink embedded deep in the fabric.  Dana, a beta, doesn’t have the nose of an alpha or omega, and even he’s told Sid his gear smells worse than anyone Dana’s ever met in the league.  Sid imagines it always takes new alphas and omegas some time to adjust to his scent, notoriously terrible.

When the spotting starts later that week, Sid realizes that this time is different.  

 

* * *

 

People make babies for all sorts of reasons, and the reason Sid and Geno make a baby is because they don’t realize that they’re making a baby.  Condoms by themselves have a reduced success rate during heat without additional birth control, which Sid isn’t on because the kind omega males take can show up as something else in piss tests, and Sid doesn’t want to fuck around with that.  It almost costs Nicklas Backstrom a silver medal at Sochi and Sid feels oddly validated by that even though a year later Sid’s the one who gets knocked up.

It was bound to happen, and Sid spends a lot of time after it happens wondering if maybe he always had wanted it to.

 

* * *

 

Some days Sid decides the baby would have been a girl and her name would have been Julia.  Other days he decides he would have named her Victoria, but he would have called her Tori for short.  She would have been born with a full head of dark hair and big brown eyes. The baby would have chubby fists that would eventually hold teething toys that would always be covered in slobber.  She would take her first steps in the kitchen toward Geno as Sid taped them on his phone. Her favorite toy would be a stuffed lion. Her favorite juice would be apple.

Some days, the baby would have been a girl, but her name would be Ashley and she’d have the same blonde hair that Geno did when he was a baby, and she would have cried too much and she would make Sid feel tired in ways he has never known, not even after a decade of playing in the NHL, but Sid would have loved her anyway.  

Some days, the baby would have been a boy and his name would have been Dima, or Roman, or Matthew.  

The baby never was, but some days Sid can imagine if given the opportunity, the baby would have been, and Sid would have loved him or her very much.

 

* * *

 

Anna is an alpha, and the way that Geno describes the sex is unreal.  When Anna and Geno fuck, no one is melting under each other’s touch. He wraps his hands around her like a hot poker and doesn’t flinch.  

“Think maybe she come out here next year, I’m keep try to convince her,” he says while they stand side-by-side, making sandwiches.  Geno hands Sid the mustard before he asks for it. “Want start family, but she has so much alpha pride about career and home and doing anything for anyone not her, you know?  Just because how it look.”

Sid gets it.  He’s got omega pride, but for kind of opposite reasons; Anna coming to America and marrying Geno and having his kids would be against expectations.  That’s what an omega does, be a kept spouse, give up the keys to the car and ride shotgun. It’s what’s been expected of Sid his entire life and he hates it.  He can’t imagine doing it, but if he did it, no one would fault him for it. If Anna did it, people would lose their fucking minds. Sid knows what that’s like, especially.  

“What would you do, if she asked you to do the same thing for her?” Sid asks, spreading mustard on his sandwich.  Thinking about Geno leaving and playing for anyone but Pittsburgh hurts, so Sid tries not to. As the years have gone by it’s seemed more and more unrealistic as Geno has had the opportunities but stayed.  

“If she asks, I leave,” Geno says, but he shrugs his shoulders, scrunches up his nose. “But if you ask, I stay.”

Geno is an amazing heat partner, and a great teammate, and sometimes Sid is worried that Geno is the love of his life, because he’s a terrible alpha and he’s not Sid’s. Geno being his friend and heat partner, and Geno being his boyfriend would be two different things, he tells himself.  Sid’s relationship is with the team, and it would be unfair, Geno already gives him so much, while Sid has to break himself up into even pieces and share himself with everyone, and just _wanting_ Geno in a long-term capacity screws up Sid’s priorities, makes him want to give Geno as much as Geno would take and let the rest of the team fight over the scraps.  It wouldn’t be healthy.

 

* * *

 

The baby is never really even a baby.  At most, it’s the size of a pea pod when Sid miscarries.  He didn’t have a name picked out, or a birth plan, or a crib or diapers or onesies or a car seat for the Range Rover.  He’s still eating a lot of fish and drinking a glass of red wine with dinner some nights and taking all sorts of medications that you’re not supposed to take when there’s a baby on the way.  He’s letting himself get knocked around every morning and every night. The baby never stood a chance. He didn’t even know there was a baby until the blood came, and by that point there wasn’t a baby anymore.  

The baby would have been named Luka, Sid thinks.  The baby would have been named Heidi. The baby would have been born in February and have had sweet almond eyes and long lashes.

 

* * *

 

Sid goes into heat in Prague, and Geno stays with him.  Geno doesn’t owe him anything, it’s the off-season, and he just suffered a pretty shitty defeat to Team Canada, but the only other unbonded alphas on Sid’s own team are babies like Nate and Ekblad.  Sid isn’t comfortable with that, and Geno is both familiar and good, a kindness, and it’s not like they haven’t fooled around outside of the regular season. It’s just a lot to ask. Geno’s pretty beat up over Russia’s loss, and tired after spending so many seasons teetering on something greater.  Sid’s been worn thin too, and with the heat he’s desperate.

It’s a good heat, what Sid remembers of it.  Geno orders room service, ribs where the meat melts off the bone into Sid’s mouth and loaves of cheesy focaccia bread and olives that make Geno’s swollen mouth shine with oil in between feeding Sid and kissing him.  He also has someone regularly bringing up little insulated coolers full of ice chips that he traces down Sid’s spine and around Sid’s shoulder blades when they’re knotted together and Sid’s still feeling molten hot, intangible.  The last day of his heat, Sid oscillates between fits of wanting to get fucked and wanting to sleep, and Geno pulls a softcover novel out of his suitcase and reads it out loud to Sid, Russian words that Sid doesn’t understand but takes comfort in anyway.

Sid wants to play hockey for the rest of his life, and he never wants to do anything else, but he imagines a second, parallel life for a different version of himself where he gets to have Geno in a more fulfilling capacity, where Geno fucks a baby or five into him and rubs his sore feet at the end of the day, and they take trips as a family to Miami in the summers; a life where Sid rubs sunscreen too-thick onto their kids’ noses and ears, and has a garage full of deflated beach balls and buckets for building sandcastles next to a tool bench like his dad has, gardening gear like his mom has-- normal people things.  At least, that’s what he imagines normal people things to be.

He aches for another, easier version of himself with a family he’s made, because he’s biologically predisposed to want those things.  The things he dreams up in heat when Geno’s swollen thick inside him are just disposable chemistry, they aren’t real. He has to remind himself all the time.

 

* * *

 

One time, Geno even asks, “You want?”

His fingers tangled up in Sid’s curls during a season where Sid has let his hair grow out.  

“Want what?”

“Baby,” Geno replies. “Tiny Sidney Crosby.”

“No,” Sid tells him easily, but only because it had been trained into him for close to a decade at that point with another line he was told to say to get anyone off his case. “But maybe I’ll get a couple dogs.”

 

* * *

 

“I want,” Geno says once, during one of Sid’s heats.  “Want see you so big, full of me, give me so many kids.  Fuck, you so beautiful, want you like this forever.”

He’s just being nice.

 

* * *

 

 

The miscarriage happens and it’s a lot of physical pain.  He’s an athlete and he knows pain, but this is a different, invasive pain that hollows him out and shakes through him like a rain stick.  He’s broken so many parts of himself over the years, and he’s bled a lot of blood, and still the blood is a lot. His stomach is scrambled eggs.  His womb is a dryer at a laundromat set to high heat, whump-whump-whumping in agony.

It takes some time for his heart to catch up, but when it does, that hurts too.  He had felt better about going into the season after a successful summer in Prague and filming the documentary and hosting the hockey school, but now he’s lost a baby he didn’t even know he had and he’s whittled down to bare bones all over again.

Sid made a thing, made a baby, and he didn’t even know it was there.  He didn’t bother to listen to his body over the summer through the back pain and the fucked up center of gravity that he had assumed was old age and the natural decay of his body.  It wasn’t his baby, a grape, a kidney bean, a fig, a lime, trying its best to grow in a hostile environment where it was never wanted. Sid never named the baby, because he just thought it was another thing he had to grit his teeth and fight through until it was another kink in his body ironed out completely, and that’s exactly what he did.

Now that it’s a moment that’s passed, Sid can’t stop thinking about it.  He can’t stop naming his unborn baby. He can’t contain all the love he never knew he could have for a thing he’s never wanted.  He can’t stop thinking about his lonely little baby in the dark trying so hard and failing anyway, a feeling he’s already been intimate with, lately.

(The baby would have been named Charlie and it could have been a boy or a girl, and they would have grown up speaking English on a regular basis, but Russian at the dinner table and maybe French to round it out, just in case they wanted to take after dad and join the QMJHL.  Maybe they would have grown up and been drafted to the Habs and made grandpa real proud too.)

 

* * *

 

A week before Sid miscarries, Geno comes back to the states and he brings Anna with him.  They’re gonna try the whole living together always, being a family thing. Geno looks like he’s won the lottery, like he’s won twenty Stanley Cups, like he’s won the whole entire world, cheated God out of it somehow.  

Sid ignores the dull ache in his lower back and gets Geno a beer from his fridge and Anna a La Croix and congratulates them both and tries not to think about it.

 

* * *

 

Like so many of his other injuries, Sid’s miscarriage is on a “need to know” basis.  He’s on the phone with Dr. Vyas while he’s driving himself to the ER, and Dr. Vyas tells Melissa and Vonda and Andy and Jen.  It’s not an easy thing to keep private, but they’ve always been good at keeping his secrets, and as far as everyone else is concerned he’s got a lower-body injury and whether he’ll be on the ice is day-to-day.  He misses the second half of the pre-season, but he’s back in time for them to lose their first regular season game to the Dallas Stars.

 

* * *

 

The hardest part is the way that Geno feeds Anna, and it reminds Sid of the heats he’s spent with Geno;  Geno and Anna bonded over the summer and now Sid’s going to have to get a new heat partner. Both Dumo and Olli offered the second they found out.  

The hardest part is that Geno spends his free time doing baby stuff, and talking about baby things.  He repurposes his old billiard room into a nursery and Sid looks in his own house, in all of the empty rooms, and starts seeing where a baby would have fit.  Spots in his home that would fit a high chair and toys, all the furniture edges and cabinets he would have to baby proof, if he would get a huge pen or actually try to put gates up everywhere in a home that was one endless open-floor concept.  Maybe he would buy a new house just for the baby.

The hardest part is that Sid’s not the only one with a body that’s breaking.  Sid is quietly out of commission for a couple of days, but then he’s back in the game.  In December, Pascal announces his retirement, and he’s never going to be able to play hockey again, so why the fuck does Sid feel so sorry for himself still?

The hardest part for awhile is all of it.

 

* * *

 

Sid comes over the night after Catherine loses her baby.  He kind of feels like he has to, mostly because Kris is a fucking mess.  He’d been suspended the game it happened, but he still hadn’t been with her, and she’d had to drive herself to the hospital.  Sid remembers sitting on a stack of unused towels from a guest bathroom in the Range Rover when heading to the ER himself, alone and out of his depth in a way he hadn’t been since the first time he’d moved away from home.

Everyone involved with the organization had known about the pregnancy; they had celebrated together at the announcement, and now they openly mourn together.  When Sid asks if Kris needs company, if Kris needs anything at all, Kris says yes, so Sid goes.

Cath’s immediate family is already there, everyone cozy together in the dark of the entertainment room except for Alex, who has long been tucked away to bed.  The house smells like it’s been scrubbed clean with bleach and vinegar, overlaid with leftover home-cooking and sickly sweet bouquets still wrapped in butcher paper on the marble kitchen counter.  Nothing smells rotten, overripe in a way that Sid couldn’t air out of his home for days.

“My parents are flying down tomorrow, but hers came as soon as we got the news.  Went and stocked our fridge and made like, a thousand casseroles while we were still at the hospital. She’s uh, I mean,” Kris says, leading him through to the kitchen.  His voice is scratchy and tired. “Perks of being a professional athlete means that she’s on all of my best drugs right now, but you know. I’m a mess and she’s doing her best.  It’s fucked up. So thanks for coming by.”

“Of course,” Sid says, because he’s Kris’s captain and friend and Sid would go to the ends of the earth to help shoulder whatever hurt he’s got. He hadn’t known if he should bring anything, but he remembered after losing his own baby he’d had to run out three separate times to get heavy-duty pads for all the bleeding his first week, so he stopped at a pharmacy on his way over.  He hands over the pads in a CVS plastic bag, handles balled up in his fist awkwardly. “I wasn’t sure if you would have everything you needed.”

Kris looks in the bag.  “Oh. Wow, yeah, I mean we got some on the way out of the hospital, but you never know.  You never fucking know. Everything counts, at this point. Thank you.”

“Yeah,” he says.  It’s the only word he can muster up, his throat feels so thick.  

“Do you want uh,” Kris says, gesturing to the lasagna and wine, “food? Drink?”

“No, I’m good,” Sid lies.  

“Okay,” Kris says, and silence settles over them as he leans back on the heels of his palms against the kitchen countertop, looking up at the ceiling.  Eventually he says, “I’ve never felt so helpless in my entire fucking life, you know that? Even when I was in the hospital after my stroke. I don’t know what to do, Sid.  I don’t know who to talk to or what I can say, and it hurts and it feels like I did something wrong. This is the second time, you know? I keep thinking what’s wrong with _me_ and still, I can’t imagine what she’s going through, because she acts so fucking strong and tough.  It has to be even worse for her, and I just, I can only watch.”

“Yeah,” Sid replies, because he doesn’t know what else to say, but God, does he know.

“I couldn’t even be there for her this time,” Kris continues.  “Did I tell you about the first time?”

“No,” Sid says.  The first time had seemed so much more private, somehow, and Sid hadn’t had the fraction of the perspective he has now to have tried to understand their grief, he’d been so much younger then, so he’d kept his distance.  

“I saw the baby,” Kris says.  His jaw clenches and unclenches a few times.  “She lost it here. It just--did you know that happens?  Like it was nothing at all, she just started feeling sick and there it was, before we knew anything was seriously wrong.  It was--I had to cut the cord, and she was bleeding everywhere and we had to put it in a plastic bag so we could take it with us to the hospital.  This little, uh, little, small thing.”

Sid didn’t know.  Omega males are different, or at least his pregnancy was different.  He’d bled the same, but they had to go in and numb him completely, pull the baby out of him.

“Christ, I’m sorry,” Kris says, and he’s crying.  “I just don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, Sid.”

“It’s okay,” Sid tells him.  Kris is taller by a little, but he folds into Sid’s arm when Sid reels him in.  “You’re doing okay.”

Kris is a quiet crier.  He lets his body shake instead and soaks through the shoulder of Sid’s shirt, and Sid holds him through it steadily.  

“I lost a baby too, you know,” he continues eventually.  Kris heaves underneath him a few times like he’s trying to catch his breath.

“What?  No. What?” he asks, voice watery and muffled where his face is still pressed against Sid.  He slides his face across Sid’s shoulder, sniffing a little but letting his cheek rest there.  “I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah,” Sid says.  It’s still weird to say out loud, like a muscle without practice.  He’s still not sure how to talk about it. He’s realizing now, maybe he needs to learn.  “When it happened I didn’t think I could tell anyone.”

“Shit, Sid,” Kris says. “I’m sorry.  God, you and Cath both. I can’t imagine.”

“I still feel like I can’t talk about it,” Sid says, the reason why left unspoken but lingering in the space between them.  “I don’t really know how to anyway. But, you know. Things are getting easier. I have good things to look forward to. I know I’m going to be okay.”

“Yeah?” Kris asks.  He looks like he wants to ask a thousand questions, but knows better.  Eventually he asks, “You are? Going to be okay.”

“Yeah,” Sid tells him, and he feels it when he says it, he knows he means it.  “I know you can’t plan for this shit, but Cath is strong. She has you. You’re doing the best you can, and it sucks right now.  But it’s going to be okay.”

Firmly, for the first time since it happened, he believes it when he says it: _we’re going to be okay._

 

* * *

 

The baby is named Nikita and he’s a boy, seven-point-one ounces born on the last day of May.  It’s a chaotic time in everyone’s life for a baby to be coming into the world, but Geno manages it with his usual lumbering grace that shouldn’t become him.  Geno gets them to the Stanley Cup finals and holds Anna’s hand in the hospital and names his new son all in a week.

Sid comes over to their house right before game five of the playoffs.  Nikita is a red-faced, big-eyed confused little thing that looks like every other baby Sid has met in his entire life.

“Very handsome,” he says, leaning down next to the couch where Anna is holding Nikita, who stares up at him terrified.  He takes Nikita’s hand, and it fits between his thumb and forefinger. “Nice to finally meet you.”

 

* * *

 

 

“ _It is always so early in here, it is before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. I am grateful for this life! And yet I miss the alternatives. All sketches wish to be real.”_

The Blue House, Tomas Transtromer

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr](http://dadvans.tumblr.com/)/[twitter](https://twitter.com/dadvansss)


End file.
